Stuart Hacking

I finally did something I should have done a long time ago and bought a macBook. It’s wonderful – like Linux only hardware works; like Windows only it doesn’t look like crap…and hardware works.A lot of thing on Windows I had started to take for granted: “If I want to do this, I must first do that” or “This works when that is already running” but OSX seems to take care of a lot of this stuff under the bonnet, so to speak.

The Mac came with a plethora of software for it’s internal peripherals and features – web browsing, photo software, iTunes, quicktime – pretty much what you’d expect. Further to this the apple development tools is a free package adding a good gigabyte of extra tools, SDKs, documentation and utilities. Add to that Mactex and Emacs and you’ve pretty much got a complete development station.Package management is dead easy – in most cases simply dragging the application into the ‘applications’ directory.

The User Interface is very smooth without being obnoxious. I for one am very fond of seeing windows slide off the screen and back in… my brain seems to comprehend window management when bits and pieces move around for it.If I have but one complaint, it’s that I seem to require almost an entire installation of Gnome just to get Gimp up and running: It may be time to explore the image editing market again.

[edit] It turns out there is now a rather nice Gimp package for OS X.

Computers, Development, Geek, fun, life Computers, fun, Geek, mac, unix